End of Development

It is high time for me to acknowledge that the development on Battlefleet Engineer ended already some years ago. The game will not leave Early Access. The price has been reduced accordingly.

Timeline

• Started: June 2012

• Early Access launch: August 2017

• Last update: July 2022

• Total development: ~13 years (active work ended ~3 years ago)

I started this when I was 23 and still learning to program with C#, having made only small games and apps before. The project spans most of my adult life - from university student to professional software developer with a decade of industry experience. What I underestimated was the total effort required to complete a game like this solo while learning. The scope also kept expanding - in hindsight, keeping it simpler with basic progression mechanics would have been more feasible.

The codebase grew from initial prototypes in 2012 to 115,000 lines by 2022. Development activity peaked in 2014-2015 (22k-16k lines/year) and again in 2017-2018 post-launch (14k-11k lines/year), then declined through 2021-2022 (4.7k-2.8k lines/year).

Current State

The game has functional ship building and combat mechanics. Ships are constructed from individual modules (thrusters, weapons, generators, armor, shields) with a resource system that affects performance dynamically. Combat uses Newtonian physics with detailed damage modeling including armor penetration, module destruction, and ship splitting. If you are into building ships, setting them up against each other, and watching them get blown up piece by piece, it can provide hours of entertainment.

Available content:

• 40+ ship designs

• 14 challenge levels

• Random battle generator, battle sandbox mode

• Steam Workshop integration

What Was Not Completed

The Early Access page listed plans for a campaign mode, additional module types, and online leaderboards. These were not implemented. There is a rough "survival sandbox campaign" prototype in the game, which is playable but very rough and minimal.

Technical Details

Built with XNA Framework, later migrated to FNA. The codebase includes custom implementations for deferred rendering, particle systems, UI layer using jQuery/CefSharp, and various detailed simulation systems.

Total: ~1,691 commits over 10 years of version control.

I'm reducing the price drastically to make this accessible to anybody interested, and to reflect that no further development will occur. I believe the pricing has always been fair for what was already available over the years. I may still release a shelved UI DPI scaling update at some point, but no further feature work is planned.

• Tomi